Interestingly, GPU usage (as measured by GPU-Z) shows less than 4% usage with OpenCL on and around 6% usage with it off. Perhaps this is just due to more interface updates with the higher playback rate. I tried messing with the prefs>gpu settings, for example, specifically setting the target card, changing caching etc, but no difference.

I have noticed the same thing. I'm doing some more rigorous testing right now, comparing Fu8 to Fu9, with and without OpenCL enabled. So far, Fusion 9 with OCL is faster on a couple of tools, evenly matched on a few more, but noticeably slower on most. The system specs I have been testing with are similar to yours, but on Windows 7.

I have found Fusion 9 to be at best only equal to Fusion 8 when rendering CPU only on Windows 10 and significantly slower when GPU rendering.

Below is a screenshot analysis that I did with a fairly sophisticated scene that renders one 4K frame (4096x2304) into a 16bit EXR file. I ran the render on my MacBook Pro and my Windows 10 workstation. The specs on both those machines are seen below the data. Note the Win10 workstation actually has 2xGTX1080 graphic cards NOT in SLI mode so they are specifically set up for GPU rendering. I rendered the scene with OpenCL setting at Auto, GPU, CPU for both Fusion 8 and Fusion 9 on both machines. Render times are in seconds.

This is a screenshot of the node network. You can see the details but it's not trivial.

The delta keyer is also about 2x as fast with 10bit 4k dpx sequences when turning off the OpenCL option. I've tried on two different computers, and different locations from the loader (network and local) looks like it is the OpenCL what's causing the slow down.

One thing to check is your OpenCL caching pref. This defaulted to Off/disabled, which was fine for the few heavyweight OpenCL tools in Fusion 8 - but may actually slow down the many lighter tools in Fusion 9, because transferring images to and from GPU memory is relatively slow.

Full caching allows Fusion to pass GPU images from tool to tool without downloading back to system memory, so this is recommended for general OpenCL usage. Basic caching always downloads GPU images right after processing, but still passes it on to the next too, while turning caching off will minimise GPU memory usage at the cost of more transfer overhead.

New Delta keyer is great but extreme slow. I found OpenCL mode is slower than CPU. I made a simple comp that have 4K footage and just merge. It seemed to be slower than Fu7. I found OpenCL option in merge tool.

I also got the same response from BM Support - that individual tools might be slower because of the time it takes to copy images to the GPU before it can start processing. They said that this won't be the case with "real world" comps where there are many tools, because images will be retained on the GPU. But that's not what I'm finding and to be honest, the transfer time thing doesn't really add up.

Transfer time from CPU RAM to GPU memory should be several gigabytes a second, so shouldn't add many milliseconds at all to the per-frame render time. But in a green screen test with the Delta Keyer, Color Corrector and a Merge, render times jumped from 0.2 seconds a frame CPU to 1.2 seconds a frame openCL. Transfer time of a 1920 x 1080 16 bit image shouldn't take a second!

Something isn't right - or am I missing something? Has anyone else found substantial speed improvements with OpenCL?

Grant Tompkins wrote:I hadn't realized how many tools now have OpenCL on by default ( merge, blur, etc ). I ended up turning off OpenCL off all together and things not only sped up but also became more stable.

You can benefit from OpenCL only with a limited CPU and GPU combination. In my case, new OpenCL tools are slower than CPU. I don't know who has benefits? By the way, BMD's testing machine seems to be faster than CPU.

Phil Hoppes wrote:I have found Fusion 9 to be at best only equal to Fusion 8 when rendering CPU only on Windows 10 and significantly slower when GPU rendering.

Below is a screenshot analysis that I did with a fairly sophisticated scene that renders one 4K frame (4096x2304) into a 16bit EXR file. I ran the render on my MacBook Pro and my Windows 10 workstation. The specs on both those machines are seen below the data. Note the Win10 workstation actually has 2xGTX1080 graphic cards NOT in SLI mode so they are specifically set up for GPU rendering. I rendered the scene with OpenCL setting at Auto, GPU, CPU for both Fusion 8 and Fusion 9 on both machines. Render times are in seconds.

[..]

Can you repeat the test by forcefully DISABLING OpenCL and ENABLING GPU. Or selecting manually the desired CPU?

Without having it deeply tested myself, I believe that the original GPU tools had been written in CUDA for Nvidia cards. OpenCL was added for better compatibility to AMD and other GPU brands (Intel...). That being said, its quite common sense among software developers that CUDA is usually faster than OpenCL.

I can enable GPU but disable OpenCL - which would leave CUDA the only meaningful option then. Maybe the GUI is simply confusing here?

I wonder what render times you will get when enabling GPU but disabling OpenCL at the same time.

I am having the same problem and switched to using CPU via the global OpenCL preferences. In there I've also disabled OpenCL tools however new tools (and existing ones) still have the "use OpenCL"option checked on the tools by default. So, how can this be changed and if I am already on CPU only do I still have to uncheck this setting on every tool manually? Or is the preference overriding it? Is there actually a way to change the same setting on multiple tools at once? Thanks!

daniel.partzsch wrote:I am having the same problem and switched to using CPU via the global OpenCL preferences. In there I've also disabled OpenCL tools however new tools (and existing ones) still have the "use OpenCL"option checked on the tools by default. So, how can this be changed and if I am already on CPU only do I still have to uncheck this setting on every tool manually? Or is the preference overriding it? Is there actually a way to change the same setting on multiple tools at once? Thanks!

if you checked the CPU as OpenCL device then fusion still runs the OpenCL code but on the CPU, if you want disable it you need to set "OpenCL" tools to disable

additional you can set the "Use OpenCL" in the nodes to disable and save that as default for the node. after that every new node you create will have the setting already "disable"

daniel.partzsch wrote:I am having the same problem and switched to using CPU via the global OpenCL preferences. In there I've also disabled OpenCL tools however new tools (and existing ones) still have the "use OpenCL"option checked on the tools by default. So, how can this be changed and if I am already on CPU only do I still have to uncheck this setting on every tool manually? Or is the preference overriding it? Is there actually a way to change the same setting on multiple tools at once? Thanks!

if you checked the CPU as OpenCL device then fusion still runs the OpenCL code but on the CPU, if you want disable it you need to set "OpenCL" tools to disable

additional you can set the "Use OpenCL" in the nodes to disable and save that as default for the node. after that every new node you create will have the setting already "disable"

Yeah, did this already for the tools I am using most frequently. Would be cool to have a global switch for that though. Thought disabling open cl tools would just do that. However this sounds like disabling open cl tools and switching to CPU in the preferences is somehow doing what I want to do. Thanks!

Are you guys using nVidia or AMD? OpenCL performance is much better on AMD cards. nVidia has been so stuck on CUDA for so long, that they still neglect proper OpenCL implementation. I run an RX VEGA 64 with Fusion, and have noticed VAST speed improvements over Fusion 8 running the same card.

LandonParks wrote:Are you guys using nVidia or AMD? OpenCL performance is much better on AMD cards. nVidia has been so stuck on CUDA for so long, that they still neglect proper OpenCL implementation. I run an RX VEGA 64 with Fusion, and have noticed VAST speed improvements over Fusion 8 running the same card.

Would you recommend AMD Vega 64 over gtx 1080 ti for fusion 9 renders? I am getting a performance improvement of 100% from osx Sierra to windows 10 already.

Based on my testing, win10 faster than osx.For merge nodes use CPU only.For global settings open CL off and GPU on, apparently this uses cuda code.The cuda option is 7-10% faster than open CL.I have dual Xeon Mac Pro 12core with gtx 1080ti.So far I have had crashes after 6-8 hours of rendering. Let's hope it completes this time.